Top Conventional Quotes

Favorite Conventional Quotes

1. "But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly ordered bodies. For the Tao does not 'know' how it produces the universe just as we do not 'know' how we construct our brains."Author: Alan Wilson Watts

2. "Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions."Author: Alice Munro

3. "I must apologize for calling so late," said he, "and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall."Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

4. "People who play conventional music are threatened by electronica and don't consider it to be as valuable as what they do."Author: Bill Laswell

5. "The reporter had to set his or her own course, had to push back against editors at times, to roam and be free to explore, to defy the conventional wisdom if necessary. It meant the reporters, whatever they covered, had to find the bookkeepers and the Deep Throats if possible. At the same time, as we had just been reminded, reporters need editors. In the end we are collaborators and they make the final calls."Author: Bob Woodward

6. "For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.' As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock."Author: Carl Sagan

7. "Then idiots talk....of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce!....But show me a good opportunity, show me something really worth being energetic about, and I'll show you energy."Author: Charles Dickens

8. "The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories."Author: Christopher Lasch

9. "We are married -and maybe this is no conventional arrangement, but it is still real."It isn't," he said."It is. What is a husband, but the man who offers you support when all the world turns you away?" Was that what he was to her? He couldn't look at her now, or she'd see how much those words affected him.She continued. "What is a wife, but a partner who will see through to your deepest wishes? We have promised each other our deepest wishes."Author: Courtney Milan

10. "I'm surprised Cole let you stay. What we do here is slightly unconventional." Bea looked suspicious and in-the-know at the same time."I'm in love with his brother." Saying this out loud to Bea felt like jumping out of an airplane—thrilling and irreversible. In that instant Livia knew her love for Blake was as real as the church walls around her.Bea took in Livia's face with wise eyes. "Why, yes. Yes you are."Author: Debra Anastasia

11. "The conventionality of the English is something I find unattractive - the whole lack of joy in the physical."Author: Denholm Elliott

12. "It is a proof of the divergence of the tendencies of the socialist and the bourgeois pictures of history—and from now on there will be two distinct historical cultures running side by side without ever really fusing—that people who have been brought up on the conventional version of history and know all about the Robespierrist Terror during the Great French Revolution, should find it an unfamiliar fact that the Terror of the government of Thiers executed, imprisoned or exiled more people—the number has been estimated at a hundred thousand—in that one week of the suppression of the [Paris] Commune [of 1871] than the revolutionary Terror of Robespierre had done in three years."Author: Edmund Wilson

13. "Why was it not good for man to be alone? If it were only man's loneliness with which God was concerned, he might have provided other companionship. But he provided woman, for she was to be man's helpmeet. She was to act in partnership with him. . . . The Lord God gave woman a different personality and temperament than man. . . .In the world today there are observed strenuous efforts to distort and desecrate this divine pattern. . . . The conventional wisdom of the day would have you be equal with men. We say, we would not have you descend to that level. More often than not the demand for equality means the destruction of the inspired arrangement that God has decreed for man, woman, and the family. Equality should not be confused with equivalence."Author: Ezra Taft Benson

14. "I don't complain of conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences."Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

15. "The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality."Author: Florence Nightingale

16. "...to think biblically rather than conventionally, to be part of a body where radical living is becoming the norm."Author: Francis Chan

17. "I've never liked categories; I've never liked boxes; I've always tried to be unconventional as much as I possibly could."Author: Gary Dourdan

18. "When it comes to animal agriculture, there is conventional, which is really hideous, and "compassionate" or "certified humane" or whatever, which *may* be *slightly* less hideous. But it's all torture. It's all wrong. These "happy" gimmicks are just designed to make the public feel better about exploiting animals. Don't buy the propaganda of "happy" exploitation. Go vegan and promote veganism."Author: Gary L. Francione

19. "Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their 'inferiors'? They would need to shed their desperate need to admire a man, and accept the gentler role of loving him. A learned woman cannot castrate a truck-driver like she can her intellectual rival, because he has no exaggerated respect for her bookish capacities. The alternative to conventional education is not stupidity, and many a clever girl needs the corrective of a humbler soul's genuine wisdom."Author: Germaine Greer

20. "Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries."Author: H.P. Lovecraft

21. "We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape — to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance."Author: Henry Kissinger

22. "I had an unconventional birth. I popped out of a vending machine, precisely like books don't. But you shouldn't read too much into it."Author: Jarod Kintz

23. "People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness."Author: Javier Marías

24. "Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root from which all longing grows. Something in you knows, perhaps remembers, that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth... Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential, and it will not rest until it is awakened."Author: John O'Donohue

25. "In most conventional novels, God is not allowed to be nuts. Nor are nuts allowed to be God."Author: John Sladek

26. "Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one "alternative" sibling and he didn't need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life."Author: Jonathan Franzen

27. "Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion."Author: Joseph Conrad

28. "Osama bin Laden, the person, more likely serves the function of a stand-in. Compare the new terrorists with partisans or conventional terrorists in Israel. These people often fight in a decentralized manner in small, autonomous units, too."Author: Jurgen Habermas

29. "The wisdom which is now conventional claims that light creates shadows. But the facts are otherwise. Darkness came first and is infinitely older and more enduring than light. Light borrows a little space; then it dies or moves on, and the dark exists again as if it had never been disturbed."Author: K.J. Bishop

30. "But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures."Author: Leo Tolstoy

31. "For me to want to be an actor was an improbable idea. I wasn't beautiful or pretty in any conventional way. I wasn't an ingenue at 22. But I was always certain of it and certain of its power. I felt the power when I went to the theater at 9, 10, 12 and 14."Author: Linda Hunt

32. "What future did the Jazter see for himself, exactly? Would his days of shikar continue indefinitely, or did he dare look beyond the beaches and the train stations and the alleys? Could he, in some part buried deep within, secretly crave conventionality? (Or was that too much of a heresy?)"Author: Manil Suri

33. "Forgetting that beauty and happiness are only ever incarnated in an individual person, we replace them in our minds by a conventional pattern, a sort of average of all the different faces we have ever admired, all the different pleasures we have ever enjoyed, and thus carry about with us abstract images, which are lifeless and uninspiring because they lack the very quality that something new, something different from what is familiar, always possesses, and which is the quality inseparable from real beauty and happiness. So we make our pessimistic pronouncements on life, which we think are valid, in the belief that we have taken account of beauty and happiness, whereas we have actually omitted them from consideration, substituting for them synthetic compounds that contain nothing of them."Author: Marcel Proust

34. "Poland is one of the few countries that can afford to conduct a conventional monetary policy and that means we have to act against the buildup of imbalances in the economy."Author: Marek Belka

35. "I'm not a money manager, but I can tell you what the conventional wisdom is. The younger you are, the more risk you can take on."Author: Maria Bartiromo

36. "Organic is something we can all partake of and benefit from. When we demand organic, we are demanding poison-free food. We are demanding clean air. We are demanding pure, fresh water. We are demanding soil that is free to do its job and seeds that are free of toxins. We are demanding that our children be protected from harm. We all need to bite the bullet and do what needs to be done—buy organic whenever we can, insist on organic, fight for organic and work to make it the norm. We must make organic the conventional choice and not the exception available only to the rich and educated."Author: Maria Rodale

37. "People can fall into habitual programmed patterns of thinking, underpinned by long-held beliefs and blind acceptance of conventional wisdom. Lying beneath such surface thoughts are mental cues that operate on the subconscious level, compelling people to act in certain ways, yielding conclusions that fit within their pre-existing biases. Many people are unaware that these processes are even occurring."Author: Mark Ireland

38. "I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful."Author: Mark Strand

39. "It is an animus, she decides, the representation of the Logos in the female, as the anima is the representation of Eros in the male. In its negative aspect it is opinionated, conventional, banal, self-righteous, argumentative . . . In its positive aspect, it conveys spirit, feistiness, the capacity for reflection and self-knowledge, the capacity to handle philosophical and religious ideas at the higher levels."Author: Michael Gruber

40. "My job involves searching for 'lost' quotations - that is, trying to find out who came up with a quotable saying that lingers in someone's mind and which they wish to use for their own purpose and which they cannot find in conventional dictionaries of quotation."Author: Nigel Rees

41. "I really identified with Jess, because my own dream was acting, which isn't the most conventional profession."Author: Parminder Nagra

42. "Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me."Author: Paul Farmer

43. "Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books." (p. 5)"Author: Rabih Alameddine

44. "You were probably educated in the conventional economic theories of your period which were magnificent and most ingenious, but--if you will pardon my saying so--all wrong."Author: Robert A. Heinlein

45. "It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States and I've never really thanked them for it, because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work."Author: Robert Jay Lifton

46. "Conventional turbines only work up to 200 feet, but capturing a small fraction of the global wind energy at higher altitudes could be sufficient to supply the current energy needs of the globe."Author: Saul Griffith

47. "In the most basic terms it was about how when we experience art without critical awareness we consent to the ideas being promoted, either intentionally or unintentionally, by the filmmaker. For instance, if you watch a racist comedian and laugh at his jokes, you are consenting to the prejudices inherent within them. Similarly, if you watch a movie which perpetuates conventional ideas about race, gender, etc., you are consenting to them and not affecting change in any way."Author: Simon Pegg

48. "Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations."Author: Thomas Hardy

49. "...the social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies..."Author: Thomas Hardy

50. "Coleridge's description of Iago's actions as "motiveless malignancy" applies in some degree to all the Shakespearian villains. The adjective motiveless means, firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are clearly not the principal motive, and, secondly, that the motive is not the desire for personal revenge upon another for a personal injury. Iago himself proffers two reasons for wishing to injure Othello and Cassio. He tells Roderigo that, in appointing Cassio to be his lieutenant, Othello has treated him unjustly, in which conversation he talks like the conventional Elizabethan malcontent. In his soliloquies with himself, he refers to his suspicion that both Othello and Cassio have made him a cuckold, and here he talks like the conventional jealous husband who desires revenge. But there are, I believe, insuperable objections to taking these reasons, as some critics have done, at their face value."Author: W.H. Auden